


My God, it's full of bars....

by Isaac_Molotov



Category: Gravity Falls, Rick and Morty
Genre: Alcohol, Badly made tea, Dreams and Nightmares, Drugs, Explicit Language, Graphic Description, Hangover, Implied Violence, Surgery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-16
Updated: 2016-07-09
Packaged: 2018-05-21 02:55:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6035227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isaac_Molotov/pseuds/Isaac_Molotov
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which an old hand at interdimensional travel helps a rookie get on his feet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. "I am just going outside, and may be some time"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Astonishing cover art for this work provided by the amazing Cibokilley!

In a neighbour universe to our own, which the locals predictably, if rather myopically refer to as “the universe”, close to the centre of an elliptical galaxy, revolving briskly around a G5V yellow dwarf star, there is a desert planet without a name.

At least, statistically speaking.

For the better part of 11 billion years, Fuck My Stupid Brother: The Planet had cooled, hosted life, gotten into moons, grown an atmosphere, quaked, erupted and gone about general planetary business in innominate bliss. For the past two weeks, however, it made its way through the cosmos under the burden of title. Like opera, Fuck My Stupid Brother: The Planet was a name that sounded best to those who didn’t understand it. As this was the case for every sentient being in this universe, save, for the time being, one, it was probably all for the best. For the one soul who did understand it, it lent a satisfying mass and tangibility to a firmly held sentiment.

Eighteen days, four hours, and thirty-two minutes ago, the trajectory of Fuck My Stupid Brother: The Planet, both spatially and historically, was minutely altered when a bright blue hole opened in the sky and spat out a screaming man named Ford. The thirty foot fall from the portal and subsequent landing on soft sand teamed up to take care of the screaming. Five minutes later, the planet’s first self-aware life stood up, brushed himself off, and lifted his gaze up unto the sky from whence no help whatsoever cameth. Ten minutes after that, he experimented with screaming again, an inverse relationship developing between profanity and audibility as the hot, dry air took its toll.

Hope drained away slowly in the following hours, as Ford realized that his brother either would not, or more likely, could not open another portal. Even if he did, the revolution and rotation of the planet meant a portal locked to the same spatial coordinates would by now either open into the vacuum of space or the crust of the planet. Of the two people who could possibly get him back, one couldn’t even talk about transdimensional engineering without a support group, and the other was getting a sunburn. At first, Ford had been tempted to indulge in depression, but thirst, coupled with the stubbornness and anger at the basic shittiness of things that fuels every decent scientist had spurred him to action. His long canvas coat became fifteen feet of knotted rags and a cover for his head and neck. A ballpoint pen and stray cotton swab in his pocket became a filtered straw. With that hopeful invention complete, he began to search the desert around him for the necessities of life.

On his second day, he caught a lizard. With shaking fingers, he tore open its throat as it struggled and sucked blood over his swollen, sticky tongue. He used the pen to pry out its eyeballs, and tried not to gag as he popped and drained them of their salty fluids. He gathered some of the dried, scrubby brush that dotted the sand, and took a kit made up of sticks, a smooth rock, and a length of string from his pockets and started a small fire. He knew the meat would dehydrate him more, but the physiology of dying seemed abstract compared to his hunger. As the sun set, he cooked and ate half the lizard, and carefully wrapped the rest in a scrap of canvas. In the days that followed, Ford moved up the planet’s food chain handily. Lizard meat attracted snakes. Snake meat attracted flying…things, flying thing meat attracted little six-legged foxes, and so on. Like a seventeenth century naturalist in the Galapagos, Ford simply walked up to whatever was eating the other half of last night’s dinner, made a mental note of it’s appearance and behaviour, and either strangled it with his tie or brained it with a rock. He’d discovered that the scrub drew its life through long taproots that released moisture and a pleasant numbness and euphoria when chewed. Somatic needs satisfied, Ford’s thoughts became more meditative.

The planet’s name had arisen organically on his fourth day from the mantra he repeated with the setting and rising of the sun, every time he cut himself on tooth or bone, every time he killed something, as he shivered through each desert night. Fuck my stupid brother. Stan would no doubt describe what had happened in the lab as an accident, taking none of the blame while Ford bore all of the consequences. Classic Stan. Ford had been a fool to think his brother could be relied on to successfully complete even the simplest task if he let on that it was in any way important to him. The disregard of his safety and happiness behind the “accidents” that formed the pivots of his life was even worse than active malice. On that planet, under alien stars, Ford carefully cut facets on a cold lump of resentment he’d carried in his chest for years until it was a perfectly defined crystal of anger. Fuck my stupid brother, for precisely these reasons.

Exploring on his eighteenth day, Ford came across a small pool of stagnant, but relatively clear water in a small depression between hills. Stuffing a tuft of cotton into the tube of his pen, he sank to his knees and drew in a mouthful, swallowed, and waited. The cramping started almost immediately, followed rapidly by a cold sweat and an immediate need to evacuate…everything. The day passed in waves of pain, nausea, and vomiting that became dry heaves once his guts were empty. Ford knew he’d been severely to moderately dehydrated since day one and couldn’t afford this. He chuckled for the first time in weeks at the thought that he’d survived interdimensional travel to die of dysentery. Between bouts, he forced himself to his feet, and made his way to the small cleft in the small hill where he kept his little heap of belongings. He decided to throw caution to the wind and chewed through his reserve of roots. Desperate times, etc. It wasn’t enough to add any body to his heaving, but whatever was numbing his mouth and throat also seemed to take the edge off his nausea. As night fell, he drifted in and out of sleep, dreams and reality merging into hallucination. He was in his lab, and then he was back on the planet. His brother was there? No wait, his father? At one point, he saw a portal open five feet away from him, only it was the wrong colour, the wrong shape. As he weakly lifted a hand toward it, a tall, thin man in a lab coat ran out, and…shot another portal from a gun before disappearing into it. He realized with a smile that his subconscious had thought to shift the emission spectrum of a light hardware, lower energy portal from blue to green before drifting into a deeper sleep.

When he woke again, it was still dark. The worst of…whatever that was seemed to have passed.

And, he thought, he’d made it through a night of hallucinations without a single Bill sighting. That alone was cause for celebration. Maybe a _whole_ snake for breakfast?

He cursed himself for tempting fate as the air in front of him became a swirling green disc. But instead of the three-sided, two-faced bodysnatcher he’d been expecting, out walked the man of his dreams.

  
FROM his dreams. The man from his dreams last night. Although anyone who had a portal-shooting gun was a strong candidate for “favourite person on the planet”, and that was saying something. Given the circumstances, Ford didn’t pay too much attention to his thoughts. For the first time in his young life, he was too exhausted for curiosity, and fed right the heck up with anomalies.

The man fixed him with an unsteady squint.

“Who the-urp- who the fuck are you?”

Ford rose shaking to his feet, and brushed his hand on his shirt before holding it out. The man ignored it.

“Dr. Stanford Pines,” he said, dropping his hand, “I came here through my own portal device, but…”

“But you got stuck. I figured as much when I came-came through here and saw you lying there like -urp-like a bum. I thought to myself ‘Who’s got twelve fingers and is damaged enough to walk through a stationary cargo-capacity one-shot transdimensional rift generator that nobody else knows how to run?’ Answer: Backupsmore Pines! Where the-urp-where the fuck is this place anyway?”

“Fuck My…I mean, I don’t know. I can’t identify any celestial bodies I'm familiar with. Knowing the power of that machine, we could be anywhere. Any dimension. Any time.”

“Wait, wait, wait. You’re-you’re telling me you didn’t even check where the fuck you were Captain Oates-ing off to before you cracked the lid. Jesus, Pines-urp, I knew you were a hack, but that’s-that’s just careless.”

“Look, how do y...”

“I mean-urp-I mean there are-you, you haven’t seen the-urp-you haven’t seen the shit I’ve seen, Pines. Anything could have come through that portal, Pines. I mean-urp-there are dimensions where hugging a person with AIDS actually gives you AIDS. You-you-you wanna be the one to-to walk us back on that one, Pines?”

“LOOK”, Ford pinched the bridge of his nose and rubbed his eyes beneath cracked lenses, “look, normally I’d enjoy being remonstrated with by a drunk stranger who apparently hates me, but it’s been a trying two weeks. Can the oral defense wait until we go somewhere with…I don’t know…plumbing and doctors?” He looked significantly at the man’s portal gun.

The man’s squint narrowed even further

“Yeah-urp-yeah, actually you look like shit.” He began typing coordinates into the gun, “Dest-destination shitty-urp- shitty planet Earth?”

Ford looked toward the rising sun.

“No. Not back there. Not yet, at least.”

“Whoa-urp-hoa, there, Ch-champ. Making-making some assumptions, there. You know I’m not an-urp-an interdimensional taxi service. Maybe -maybe this is a one-time-urp-deal. I travel with someone, th-the-there’s gotta be something in it for-for me.” His gaze narrowed again, until his eyes were practically closed. After a moment, he began to snore softly. Suddenly he belched and woke with a start, “Something in it for me!”

Ford thought for a moment. “How do you feel about…” his voice sank to a whisper, “drugs?”

“Affectionately. I’m listening…”

“Okay, look, the bushes around us have roots with mild paralytic and psychoactive properties when chewed. If I could isolate the compound responsible and purify it…”

“Whoa-ho wait. Are you telling me that fuckin’-that fuckin’ hootyroot grows on this shithole? Shit motherfuckerrrrr, I know a guy-urp-who’ll give us top schmeckle for that shit. My name is-urp-Rick, and you just bought yourself a taxi ride, dweeb.”


	2. Two guys walk into a bar

Contrary to what most priests, scientists, and loss prevention staff will tell you, there are very few universal laws governing life in the multiverse. Life, like most embarrassing inconveniences, has a way of striking under inopportune circumstances in the exact fashion it wants to. However, the very few proficient travellers who’ve managed to retain the motivation and higher brain functions to record their observations will tell you that there’s one immutable pandimensional constant. Depending on where you ask, it’s known variously as Dr. Bob’s Law, Aaaargh’s Phenomena, or the No Shit Principal of Neurobiology. It is simply this: wherever mutation and natural selection have tag-teamed life into a state of intelligent self-awareness, life will find a way to cure itself, even if it’s just for the weekend. In most contexts, this phenomenon leads to few unfortunate side effects beyond folk music and the occasional toad extinction. In some cases, however, important people get upset enough about all the drumming to pass laws with as much chance of practical success as a sno-cone stand in a bloomery furnace.

The upswing of this latter state of affairs is a rather advantageous climate of supply and demand for private business, provided all participants are willing to undergo a certain degree of hassle. For Ford, who’d joined the clandestine interdimensional narcotics trade five hours ago, this primarily consisted of prickles, which he’d been carefully removing with a pair of tweezers since arriving at the bar with his newly-acquired business associate. At least, he was fairly sure it was a bar. The metallic odour, dingy lighting, and fluid-repellent upholstery were certainly reminiscent of his few forays into drinking establishments as a student, and the behaviour of his fellow occupants seemed inconsistent with sobriety. Finally, a waitress stopped at their table, confirming his hypothesis.

“What’ll it be, boys?” she asked

“I’ll – urp –have whatever he’s having,” Rick pointed to a vaguely humanoid figure who was swinging from the light above the nearest table.

A pen and pad suspended inside the translucent, gelatinous matrix of the waitress began scribbling, she turned to Ford, “And for yourself?”

“Uh…I don’t suppose you have ginger ale, or maybe mint tea?”

Rick and the waitress scowled almost audibly, but the pen kept moving, which Ford took as a grudging ‘yes’. The waitress squidged off to the bar.

“J-Jesus Christ, Pines, are you trying to start shit? A – urp – a place like this has stan-standards.”

“Yes, I can tell by the thin film of mystery fluid covering most of the furniture and patrons.”

“Hey, you-you know someplace nicer, be my guest. But, you’re sounding pretty –urp –pretty choosy for a guy who spent last night fucked up next to a puddle of his own shit.”

Ford crossed his arms. “That’s different. I was sick.”

“You can say that again. I-I thought _I_ was gonna throw u-urp-p.”

Rick paused when the waitress appeared and slowly expelled their drinks from her torso onto the table. A glass of evil-smelling oily something in front of Ford, and a piping hot mug that smelled like boiled tic-tacs in front of Rick. She fixed them with a stare that dared them to say anything, made change for Rick, and slid back to the bar. They switched glasses, and Rick continued.

“ Look, we’ve just unloaded enough hoot to-urp-to nudge down prices for a while, and there might be a couple individuals who may-who may take a sudden market glut of their main product the wrong way. I’m not saying we’ve _definitely_ started an interdimensional drug war, but we may want to lay low for a while.”

Ford, who, in the past month had been betrayed by a trusted friend, engaged in fisticuffs with his estranged brother, discovered interdimensional travel, murdered approximately fifty pounds of fluffy animals with his bare hands, survived space dysentery, bought his freedom from a desert world with a class 1 controlled substance, and was now taking his tea in an alien dive bar took this with an equanimity that surprised even himself.

“Well, this place _does_ have a surfeit of low.” He took a sip of the tea, which was almost certainly boiled tic-tacs.

“Yeah, y-urp-eah, laugh it up. We wouldn’t be in this joint if somebody hadn’t been-urp- driving recklessly. Tell me more about this-this machine of yours. What does it run on?”

Ford mumbled.

“What-what was that? I didn’t quite I didn’t catch that.”

“Three hundred gallons of uranium-plutonium mixed oxide fuel.”

Ricks eyes widened. “Whoa-hoa, first of all, I'd like to introduce you to a friend of mine called 'The Metric System'. She’s also friends with pretty much every other scientist on Earth. Second, three hundred gallons of MOX? What, couldn’t you-couldn’t you fit the fucking sun in your lab?”

“It…it wasn’t _entirely_ my design.”

“Oh ho, _now_ it’s all coming out. So the brilliant Stanford Pines, Ph suck my D got high-urp-igh with a little help from his friends. Who was it? Was it Stringer at MIT? Couldn’t have been anyone from Backupsmore, that place churns out idiots like I churn out…”

Ford interrupted, “You talk about me as though you’ve read a copy of my CV, and yet, as far as I know, we’ve never met. Before we go any further, how exactly do you know who I am?”

“Look – urp- look, when a kid from Backupsmore gets an NSF straight out of his PhD, people notice. Word gets around. When he uses that NSF to build a creepy cabin in the woods and convinces an up-and-coming computer scientist to be his live-in girlfriend, word _really_ gets around. I thou-urp-ought I should keep an eye on you. Thought maybe you’d be just smart enough to be dan-urp-angerous. And now, here we are.” Rick gestured to the bar with a sweeping arm and took a swig of his drink.

“You can’t exactly take the high road on avoiding dangerous research, Rick. That-that _gun_ of yours could cause unspeakable havoc in the wrong hands.”

“Well then, it’s a good thing it’s in-urrp-mine. And I didn’t need any hand-holding to finish it, so nobody else out there can build one. You-urp-you might as well tell me who checked your math for you, Pines, seeing-urp-seeing as I’m probably going to be-going to be rescuing them from god knows what hellhole in a week. Was it McGucket?”

“No,” Ford looked into his cup, “Fiddleford and I aren’t working together any more. We had…creative differences.”

“I’m-urp-I’m surprised you have creative anything. Come on, spill the beans.”

“It wasn’t a person. His name is Bill. He convinced me he was some kind of muse. I’d been working on the portal for months, and getting nowhere. He…he was able to enter my mind and show me where I’d been making mistakes.”

“Wait, wait, urp-wait. Did you say Bill? Does-does he look like if one-eyed Charlie Chaplin fucked a tortilla chip?”

 


	3. Ask me no questions...

“So you’ve met Bill.”

“So you’re on a first name burrpasis? Yeah, I’ve met Bill. A while back. Started having these weird dreams. Way weirder than usual.” The liquid in Rick’s glass sloshed over the sides as he used it to gesticulate, “Stars turning into eyes. Light bulbs turning into eyes. Fucking open cans of niblet corn turning into eyes. I’ll-I’ll hand it to him, for a mind demon he’s really got his aesthetic figured out. When he finally managed to get past the eye thing and we actually started talking business, he tried to spoo-urp-oonfeed me some soft shit about how he was a ‘muse’ and picked the-urp-the best mind of each generation to teach his secrets to and how needed me to make him a portal to enter our world.”

“And…?”

“And? And I told him to go fuck himself. Jesus, Sixer, you’re- you may not be genius material, but you’re a smart guy when you’re not being stupid. You gotta know that nobody talks up weirdoes like us unless he wants something for his trouble. I mean-I mean, imagine him thinking that I was vain enough to swallow a line like that, no questions asked. Also, tell me one thing: if he can fly, why the-what the hell does he have a cane? That’s fucking _suspicious_. I tried to make him show me his side of the picture, what he really wanted and-and poof! No more triangle. Guess he decided to try his luck on the runner up. So-so how did he get you?”

Ford peered into his mug of tea. Finally, he drew a deep breath and spoke.

\-------

The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.

The mitochondria is also the weird hoarder uncle who’s super into genealogy of the cell.

The endosymbiotic hypothesis of mitochondrial origin states that they were, at one point, independent organisms. Sometime in the neighbourhood of a billion years ago, these simple creatures got themselves into an ill-advised friends-with-benefits arrangement with the sexy, sexy eukaryotes that are the mothers and fathers of us all. As most partners do, they brought a lot of baggage into the relationship, including their very own complete set of DNA. In animals, this DNA, like casserole recipes, the _look_ , and functional alcoholism, is usually passed down from mother to child. Unlike most casserole recipes, it mutates at a fairly constant rate, such that, by rifling through the mitochondrial DNA of two species, one can tell how long ago they stopped productively sexing each other up.

For chimps and humans, mitochondrial DNA tells us that previously normal, healthy relationships started getting a bit weird about seven to ten million years ago. So, it stands to reason that anything both chimps and humans are really, really good at, we worked out sometime before that. One of these things that chimps and humans both do well?

Lying.

Chimps in behavioural studies have been found to lie to each other primarily about bananas, the location and quantity thereof. Humans, generally speaking, have extended this talent for duplicity beyond the world of fruit and lie about pretty much everything. One could argue that a behavioural strategy predating chins must confer some kind of adaptive advantage, and one could thus argue that the whopper Ford was about to tell was an unavoidable outcome of biological necessity.

One would be very generous.

\-------

 “He told me he was a refugee. That there had been a massive interdimensional war. That his peaceful and wise people had been wiped out, and that he’d barely managed to secret himself in the mindscape before suffering the same fate. He told me he needed passage to a safe haven, and that our planet seemed like his best bet. How could I say no?”

“Oh my-oh my god. Jesus, Pines, that’s-that’s fucking low. That’s like…there’s war, but there’s also the rules of war. Pines,” Rick took out his portal gun and began to input coordinates, “Tell you what. Let’s-let’s fucking buzz that asshole’s dimension and show him what the universe thinks of…of fucking _shapes_ who take advantage of young and simple minds such as yo-”

Ford nearly sent their drinks flying as he lunged across the table for the gun.

“NO DON’T! I mean…” He sat back down as Rick fixed him with a look of surprise, “…I mean, don’t worry about it.  Things happen.  Lesson learned. Yes, I was foolish enough to take Bill at face value, and now I’m bearing what are partially the consequences of that folly. Yes, Bill guided me in construction of the portal, but I discovered his lies before his plans could come to fruition. Let’s not give him a chance to finish the job.

Rick’s eyes narrowed and he took a long, loud sip of his drink before replacing the gun.

“So, let’s-let’s review. You’re telling me you built an interdimensional portal at the bidding of a-urp- a lying mind demon, and then you _found out_ that he was a lying mind demon. And instead of burning your lab down and cashing in the insurance, you decided it would be a-a good idea to go ahead and open the portal?”

Ford took a swallow of tea and set the mug back down with a grim set to his eye.

“ _I_ didn’t open the portal. I stopped work on the project after I began to doubt Bill’s story. To make sure nobody else could ever make the same mistakes, I asked my twin brother Stanley to help me secure my research...”

“Wait, twin-twin brother? Are you telling me ther-urrp-ere’s at least two gullible idiots like you running around the multiverse?”

Ford’s hands tightened around his mug, “Stanley isn’t like me. He’s average at best, and a downright menace at worst. His role was simply to hide one of my journals.”

Rick snorted “What? Didn’t want your mom to find out you and Chad from tenth grade had-had your first kiss with tongues after the dance?”

“Those journals contained vital information about the portal and about Bill. It was essential to send at least one of them far, far away, essential to keep my work from falling into the wrong hands. Stanley…disagreed. We fought, and in the process, he reactivated the portal. I…I was too close.  The gravitational pull of Fuck-of the other, more massive planet pulled me through. I suppose he’d say it was an accident.”

“Is-is that what you say?”

Ford’s jaw twitched. “I say it doesn’t matter. As you so astutely put it,” Ford swept his hand across their surroundings, “‘here we are’.”


	4. The day after yesterday

Rick stared into the middle distance as though his thoughts were elsewhere. Well, more elsewhere than usual. His voice was flat.

“Yeah…here we are.”

Without warning, he snapped back into the present and with a smile that would give an actuary heartburn, hollered, “So, let’s get fucking traaaaaaashed, mother fucker! C’mon, you’ve had a r-urrrp-rough week or ten, but you-but you made it throu-uuughrp-ouh, and thanks to our little business venture we’ve got-we’ve got-we’re packing enough cheddar to buy this place!”

“I don’t know Rick – ”

Rick slammed his fist down on the table, attracting the attention of their waitress and sending Ford’s remaining tea to join its kin among the floor stains.

“Hey! Hey you! We’ll take two, uh,” he pointed at his glass “two more of what-of whatever that was. Oh, and the-urrp-the same for my friend! And keep ‘em coming!”

****

Ford woke the next morning feeling like the first start-up after a catastrophic instrument failure.  

_Warning, PINES.EXE encountered an unexpected error and needed to close. Press any key to restart._

He opened his eyes tentatively. Sunlight and pain poured into his head. He aborted visual and burrowed his face further into his pillow.

Pillow.

_Initializing runtime environment…_

He braced himself and opened his eyes just enough to see where he was. 

He was in a bed. Looking around, he saw that the bed was in a room. A room he was fairly certain he’d never seen before. He sank back into the pillow and rolled away from the window of sun and hurting. Soothed by the change in light regime, he decided to chance it and try for picture again.

Not only was he in a bed, he was in a very, very large bed – albeit huddled over to one side. From the rumpled sheets and misshapen pillow beside him, it was fairly obvious that someone else had slept there.

 _Well, that’s nice_ , he thought to himself, and dragged the other pillow over his head.

Full consciousness slung itself across his skull like a handful of pennies in a cold, wet sock. The second pillow was hurled aside as a number of questions began presenting themselves for his urgent consideration without bothering to line up and wait their turn.

_Running memory check. Press any key to abort…_

The bar. He had definitely been at a bar.

With Rick.

Rick was buying them both drinks, apparently using some kind of exponential function to determine both the size and periodicity of his orders. He remembered protesting weakly before making the conscious decision to release an entire year of mounting tension in a fifteen megaton explosion of Why The Fuck Not?

Subsequent memories existed in a realm of probability, rather than of fact. He ran through them one by one.

_DRUNKEN_BARFIGHT.DAT_

He noticed for the first time that his knuckles ached.

Oh god, so that probably happened. But he wasn’t in jail or anything, so nobody got _that_ hurt, right? He’d be in jail if it was serious, wouldn’t he? Okay, not so bad. Next.

_BITING_THE_PLANTMAN.DAT_

Wow. Okay. That sounds…made up. Let’s go fifty-fifty on that one.

 _JACUZZI_SUITE_WRICK.GIF_?

Ford shot up in bed and scanned the room desperately.

No Jacuzzi. No Rick.

Oh, thank god.

He settled back down into the bed and tried to connect the fragments of the previous evening into a unified whole. It was like trying to do origami with wet tissue paper. He relaxed and let his mind wander, which is generally a good idea if you’re hunting for the evasive answer to a complex question, but a bad one if that answer is, in fact, hunting you.

Ford felt his guts slowly fill up with ice water as a memory surfaced from the darker recesses of his mind. A memory that was absolutely a dream, but also absolutely, horrifyingly real.

_Corrupted file detected. Press R to restore._

***

Ford woke with a start, scattering papers, junk food wrappers, and at least one empty bottle of Lagavurgin Fine Scotch Whiskey across his already chaotic work bench. It took a moment for the disorientation to subside as he realized he was back in his lab in Gravity Falls. Of course. Home. Where else would he be?

Swiftly receding dreams tinged the edges of his mind with ugly colors. Desert planet? Fuck my…Stanley? Bill?

Bill.

Bill had to be stopped! That thought, at least, was crystal clear. He shot up in his chair to peer through the plexiglass window separating the control room from the portal.  Mercifully, albeit confusingly, it appeared unfinished. The inverted-pyramidal palladium alloy housing was complete and the coordinate control dial surrounding the main aperture looked ready to go. However, several of the cooling hoses, most of the fuel lines, and the lion’s share of his grudgingly installed OSHA-compliant failsafe switches had yet to be connected to the central unit. There was still hope! He flew out of his chair and raced into the main lab. Next to one of the large, rolling toolboxes he’d purchased back when organization seemed like an important aspect of scientific endeavour he found the twelve-pound sledgehammer that Fiddleford had laughingly dubbed ‘The Ambassador’. He didn’t even bother to choke up, choke down, or whatever the fuck you were supposed to do before unleashing a twelve-pound sledgehammer upon the world. He simply hurled it, double-fisted and with all his might at the portal, intending to do so again and again until his work, like his life, was reduced to a pile of smoking rubble at his feet.

This entirely reasonable plan was unexpectedly thwarted by the portal itself, when a black arm shot out from one of its downward-sloping sides, snatched the sledgehammer out of the air midflight, and crushed it to atoms. A similar arm grew from the opposite side of the housing, and the aperture opened to reveal a large, white eye with a long, black pupil.

“Good instinct, Brainiac, but you’re about six weeks too late!”

The housing of the portal came alive with blue fire and rotated 180 degrees. With a barely audible ‘plink’ two legs appeared at its base. A cane and top hat wafted down from the ceiling to settle in its hands.

“I get it, you know.” The figure said, placing the hat on its head, “Breaking up is hard to do! Especially with a catch like me! But running off to another dimension without even leaving a note? That’s just…” the figure flashed red “IMPOLITE.” Crimson bled away into yellow, “Not to mention cliché! Hey, you should try teaching yourself the guitar next!”

“You! What do you mean 'too late'? What have you done?! How are you here!?”

“Wow! This crazy mix-up with my portal is making a lot more sense now that the whole ‘denser than a uranium fruitcake’ thing is on the table! The answer is: I’m not, genius, and neither are you!”

“You mean…”

“We’re in your head, Smart Guy!”

“And those dreams…?”

“You ate a lizard!”

“How the hell did you find me, Cipher!? What are you doing here?!”

“Me and you, kiddo, we’re _connected_ , remember? Across space, across time, across ALL DIMENSIONS! Plus, you’ve consumed so many mind-altering substances in the past twenty-four hours your brainwaves stick out like a compound fracture! We’re in the mindscape, Champ! I can pretty much do whatever I want here! Finding my old pal is nothing!” He paused. “You know, you look tense!  How ‘bout you relax!” Bill snapped his fingers and the comfiest-looking chair he’d ever seen appeared with a poof! behind Ford, whose look of helplessness dissolved into rage.

“Relax!? I don’t have anything to say to you, Bill, and nothing you can say is going to do you any good! We’re finished! Get out of my head and leave me alone!”

“I said _RELAX_!”

An invisible force pushed him down into the smothering softness of the comfy chair.

“I know what’ll help you unwind! How about a gratuitous pseudointellectual narrative aside?”

“…what?”

Bill snapped his fin-

Across most dimensions, _Homo sapiens_ are one of the less well-known sentient life forms. This could be due to the fact that most members of the species find it difficult enough interacting with other humans, let alone the simply boggling variety of life scattered throughout the multiverse. It could also be chalked up to their pickiness about small details like ambient temperature, atmospheric pressure, and oxygen availability. Regardless, humans are a bit like the zebus of the multiverse. Most people are aware of their existence, but ask five of them to draw one, and you’ll probably wind up with four vaguely similar images and a duck.

There _is_ one widely-known fact about humans, however, thanks to its appearance as the final question in an episode of the wildly popular Cromulon game show, “Who Wants To Be Alive At The End Of This Program?”. The fact? Humans are the only species known to have invented surgery thousands of years before general anaesthetic.

Yes indeedy. Ask any anthropologist about ancient surgery and they will gleefully regale you with case studies of the one procedure that leaves enough of a dent in the skeleton that they’re able to recognize it when they dig up the mad bastards who had it done: trepanning.  Basically, trepanning involves having your scalp peeled back with a sharp rock and an opening scraped, hacked, or drilled into your cranial vault. Then your soft-top gets rolled back up so as not to do anything silly like expose your fresh brain hole to the elements. All of this was usually done under the sedative equivalent of a stiff drink. Signs of healing on trepanned skulls indicate that success rates, if that’s what you want to call them, were actually fairly decent, likely due to the sterility of a freshly sharpened rock.

Honest.

As with most things, archaeologists pretend they have some idea why people did this to each other, but don’t really. Recorded motivations for old-school trepanation include curing migraines, relieving cranial pressure due to hydrocephaly, facilitating visions, and banishing evil spirits from the mind.

The latter explanation leads to some interesting speculation about a variant of the procedure practiced in South America, wherein the patient not only received a much-needed hole in the head, but also a shiny disc of silver or gold screwed to their scull to cover it up. Archaeologists generally assume these plates were put in place to hold things in, but perhaps they were really intended to keep things o-

-gers

“WOW! I wish I could have that self-indulgent garbage beamed directly into my thoughts all day, don’t you!? But now that you’re settled, we’ve got other things to talk about. Like how I’m going to track you down, peel your face off, and use it as a pasta strainer!”

Ford struggled vainly against the force holding him into the chair.

“You’ll never catch me alive, Cipher!”

Bill squinted. “Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Actually, I’m okay with that! But tell whoever kills you that I call dibs on the face! Oh, and speaking of having an extra face _lying_ around, I really liked the version of our meet cute you threw at ol’ Prick Sanchez! Remind me to invade _his_ dreams for a little chat of our own sometime!”

“You leave him out of this! He’s just trying to help me-”

“-escape from the consequences of your DUPLICITOUS TREASON!? Okay, sure! Sounds good! Hey, SEE YOU REAL SOON, PINES!”

****


End file.
